Getting a renewed certificate onto ten sites at once

A client ran ten sites out of one hosting account, renewed their certificate, and needed it installed on every one of them. That sat on top of two years of smaller fixes across the same sites.

The objective

The client had renewed a certificate covering ten sites hosted in a single account. A renewed certificate that hasn't been installed does nothing, and browsers start warning visitors the day the old one expires, so this had a deadline on it whether or not anyone wrote one down.

The rest was ordinary maintenance for someone running their own sites: a page builder that stopped loading in the editor, a shop page in the wrong order, a contact page that had quit working, and transfers whenever they changed hosts.

What I did

I installed the renewed certificate across the sites in the account.

I fixed the page builder when its editor stopped loading, sorted out the shop listing order, and got the contact page working again.

I moved sites between hosts and made duplicates of them whenever they asked.

And when the access details they sent didn't work, I checked them and told them exactly which ones were the problem, instead of reporting the job blocked and leaving them to guess why.

The result

Sixteen orders between 2018 and 2022, all for the same client.